Tips for Twitter Novices BY a Twitter Novice (Part 2)

Harley Grove really haven’t been using Twitter for very long and we are always learning of new ways in which to make the most of it. This is the second Tips for Twitter Novices BY a Twitter Novice; probably best to read the first one first (if you see what I mean). Please note that there are far more Twitter-knowledgeable people out there so this is really our view as a novice to Twitter and hopefully this blog will help similar novices.

Since the last Tips for …. blog, we have found and started to use a few further Twitter tools and applications that further enhance the Twitter experience.

Recently, Harley Grove attended a local meeting of other Twitter users (“tweeple”). The meeting was very useful in that it meant that the users met face-to-face and exchanged ideas and tips of how they use Twitter. Harley Grove have been looking into finding and setting up similar meetings (“tweetups”) and events and came across Twtvite, which is a great event management tool to use with Twitter. You are able to locate tweetups or create your own, show a map of its location, add to your calendar, manage waiting lists if event full etc…

Twitter is great and one of the great things about it is that you are restricted to 140 characters so you have to get your message across in a clear and concise way. However, there are times when you would like to send longer messages and don’t want to be tied down to the 140 characters such as when you need to provide customer support. This is where twtlong comes into its own as it allows longer tweets and creates a “bridge” between the normal tweets and a blog; sort of a “midi-blog”. You are also able to add photos, videos etc…

Need to let everyone know about Special Offers that you are currently running ? Give twtQpon a try as it enables you to produce money-off coupons to distribute via Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. We are about to use it to promote special discounts against some of our services.

When Harley Grove was having its website re-designed, we thought we would ask other tweeple for their feedback on how they thought it was looking. So… we used twtpoll to ask them and we collated the answers using this very useful Twitter application that allows you to create simple online polls to use with Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

Harley Grove have now updated their status quite a bit and, although we haven’t got loads of Followers and don’t Follow many other tweeple, it would be a real pain to have to set it all up again and impossible to remember what we tweeted about some time ago. So…we looked into being able to take a backup of all of our Followers, people that we Follow and all of the tweets that we have created. Tweetake covers all of this and makes sure that you have this backup of your Twitter experience. However, it only currently takes care of those users with less than 1000 followers so use Twittersafe if you have more than 1000 followers.

Twitter is great for direct messaging (DM) to and from your Twitter Followers and that your DMs are sent to you by email. Yes, this is great, but when you want to reply to these DMs when you have been notified by email messages, it’s a real pain because you then have to go into your Twitter client and then reply from there. Well, not any more as you can now use Topify to reply via email. This saves loads of time and although you need to sign up for a free Topify email address, we have found this very useful.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some more useful ideas and we hope that these tips  will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington ’s TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :